Discover More from This Category: The Outside Story

Under the water, December’s peak leaf season

December 22, 2015
By Declan McCabe By December, foliage season is long over for us humans, but it’s peak season under the water. Last month, as the last bus of tourists departed for home, fallen leaves accumulated in our streams and rivers, starting a process that’s critical for the nourishment of everything from caddisflies on up the food…

When mushrooms attack

December 15, 2015
By Rachel Sargent The oyster mushroom: delicious, frequently spotted on veggie pizzas, and predatory. That’s right. The hyphae of many fungi, including the oyster mushroom, attack and paralyze prey. Then, as R. Greg Thorn of Western University enthusiastically described, the fungi “grow down their throats and digest them from the inside.” Oyster mushrooms live in…

With cooler water, better prospects for shad migration?

December 4, 2015
By Michael J. Caduto There was a time in the waters known by the Abenaki peoples as Kwenitegok, “Long River,” when migratory fish moved in such multitudes that their backs appeared as a living bridge from shore to shore. After the glacier melted, shad and alewives returned to migrate up our rivers for 10,000 years,…

The Outside Story: The apple bears

November 27, 2015
By Elise Tillinghast Last week, a black bear in a blaze orange collar showed up in our yard. Two cubs followed close behind. The sow paused to observe the house, then led her cubs up across our field and down into a small stand of apple trees beside the road. There the family feasted on…

The Outside Story: Fisher families fall out in fall

November 20, 2015
By Carolyn Lorié Along with the crisp mornings and crimson colors that signal summer’s slide into fall, there are changes occurring in the forests that go mostly unnoticed. Among them is the dispersal of fisher kits from their mother’s territory into their own. Little is known about the process of fisher families breaking apart, except…

The Outside Story: Hunting mushrooms: the old, not bold approach

November 11, 2015
  By Carolyn Lorié When you stumble across something purple in the forest, it’s hard not to stop in your tracks. At least it was for me on a recent hike in Thetford, when I came across three purple mushrooms. They stood about four inches tall, with saucer tops that were nearly black in the…

The Outside Story: Migration takes guts

November 4, 2015
  By Todd McLeish As an avid birdwatcher for more than 30 years, I’ve long been familiar with the big picture of songbird migration. Tiny blackpoll warblers, for instance, fly 1,500 miles from southern New England to the Caribbean in a single two- or three-day flight across open water with nowhere to land if they…

The Outside Story: Witch’s brooms

October 30, 2015
By Joe Rankin Harry Potter rode one during the Quidditch matches at Hogwarts. The Wicked Witch of the West zipped around on one in the Wizard of Oz. We’re talking, of course, about witch’s brooms. No one knows exactly why witches were associated with with flying brooms. But the trope is remarkably persistent. The witch…

The Outside Story: A primordial lake monster

October 23, 2015
  By Madeline Bodin It came from the lake. It is a life form nearly as old as life itself. Living peacefully in the depths for eons, it is awakened by humankind’s abuse of the environment. It strikes out with toxins that attack nerves or the liver. Attempts to kill it only make it more…

The Outside Story: October showers

October 16, 2015
By Laurie Morrissey We call them shooting stars, and they never fail to make us catch our breath in surprise and wonder. But they’re not stars at all. Those bright, brief streaks across the night sky are meteors. Clear skies permitting, the next few months bring three excellent chances to see batches of them. Meteors…

Zebra mussels: voracious filter feeders

October 6, 2015
By Declan McCabe Invasive species have earned their bad reputations. English sparrows compete with native birds from Newfoundland to South America. Australian brown tree snakes are well on their way to exterminating every last bird from the forests of Guam. And I don’t think anyone can fully predict how Colombia’s rivers will change in response…

The Outside Story: Black swallowtails have many disguises

October 1, 2015
  By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul It was the dotted, orangey-yellow and black stripes that stood out, drawing my son’s gaze to the edge of the sandbox. A small caterpillar clung to the goutweed, munching away on the green leaves. At first we thought it was a monarch caterpillar, but the stripes weren’t quite right. Out…

The Outside Story: See what’s in the milkweed patch

September 24, 2015
By Barbara Mackay Eight or so years ago I collected milkweed seeds and painstakingly buried them one at a time under leaf debris at the back edge of my yard, hoping they would mature and attract more monarch butterflies to my home. The project has been wildly successful, but recently the monarch population has declined.…

The Outside Story: No easy recovery for bats

September 18, 2015
By Todd McLeish In 2006, I joined a team of biologists to trap bats in Vermont’s Chittenden County. We were searching for North America’s rarest bat, the Indiana bat, which had recently been discovered breeding in a forest in Middlebury. The biologists hoped to identify additional populations of this endangered species and develop a better…

A thorny problem: multiflora rose

September 10, 2015
By Carolyn Lorié Multiflora rose is not without charm; in fact, there was a time when people went out of their way to plant it. The pretty spring flowers have a sweet scent; birds nest in the sturdy branches and eat the berries. You might even catch a glimpse of a bear or snowshoe hare…